Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, we have a very special edition of the newsletter packed with everything I saw and heard at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, held in Phoenix from February 12 to 14. Founded in 1848, AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society, with over…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists with the U.S. military have revived microbes frozen in Alaskan permafrost that dates back nearly 40,000 years—leading to the discovery of 26 new species—as part of an effort to pioneer…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss parenting blogs, Pinterest sawing its own legs off, and legal guardrails. EMANUEL: I felt a great relief this week getting out this story about Alpha School, an…
Police in Claremore, Oklahoma arrested a local man after he went slightly over his time giving public remarks during a city council meeting opposing a proposed data center. Darren Blanchard showed up at a Claremore City Council meeting on Tuesday to talk about public records and the data center. When he went over his allotted…
Almost a decade ago Jason and I sat in the roof garden in VICE’s Brooklyn office to talk to Whitney Phillips, a professor and expert on digital communications and ethics. The media, academics, and political pundits were still trying to wrap their minds around the fact that Donald Trump won his first presidential election, and…
Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it’s destroying the site. Since 2009, the image sharing social media site has been a place for people to share their art, recipes, home renovation inspiration, corny motivational quotes, and more, but in the last year users, especially artists, say the site has gotten…
In its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Palantir says that increased regulation of immigration may impact the company’s ability to hire the talent it needs. At the same time, Palantir provides the technological infrastructure for the Trump administration’s mass deportation mission. As 404 Media has shown, Palantir considers Immigration and…
This week we start with Emanuel’s wild story about Alpha School, a very hyped AI-powered school. Emanuel got leaked documents and spoke to former employees. After the break, Sam tells us what happens when someone decides to make an AI nudify OnlyFans with your likeness. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about the agencies…
Alpha School, an “AI-powered private school” that heavily relies on AI to teach students and can cost up to $65,000 a year, is AI-generating faulty lesson plans that internal company documentation find sometimes do “more harm than good,” and scraping data from a variety of other online courses without permission to train its own AI,…
An underground site uses facial recognition to reveal the site a camgirl streams on, potentially letting someone take a woman’s photo from social media, then use the site to out their sex work. The site presents a serious privacy risk to sex workers, some who may not want stalkers, harassers, or employers to discover their…
